Product Description

The Roman Empire is in its heyday: Albion, as England was known before the arrival of the Romans, should be taken, but the game will be determined through the careful selection of and the orderly expansion of settlements, forts and battlements. Do we need more resources, greater defensive strength, or more nobles and legionnaires? What's needed, of course, is everything, but what's the right order for the choices you must make? Whoever first develops three settlements wins the game.

Product Reviews

Albion first appeared at Essen 2009, and at first glance seems to be like so many
other euro games - it takes about 60-90 minutes to play, is suitable for 2-4 players
ages 12 and up, and features the usual box-load of tokens and player pawns. But there
are several things that set it apart, because unlike many euro games there's not the
sniff of a cube or the sniff of a victory point. In fact, it's a colonization type of
game, where the aim is to be the first player to complete the building of three
complete settlements on a map of Albion, the name used to denote England before the
Roman invasion.

The theme is quite a good one, and features players serving as envoys of the Roman
emperor, in a race to conquer the land, collect resources, develop buildings, and
most importantly produce the best settlements. To accomplish this, you'll compete
with other players to use resources like wood, fish, stone, and gold (beautifully
denoted with tokens shaped to represent these respective items) to construct various
buildings on the map. You'll need to move your settlers and soldiers carefully around
the various regions on the board, building resource plants (to produce more
resources), fortifications (to help with your movement), ramparts (to help with your
defence), in the quest to be the first to complete all four stages of three different
settlements. In doing so, you'll have to beware of the native Picts, who will at
times prove hostile to your building efforts. There's no trading, but from the
description just given you'd almost think it sounds like "The Settlers of Albion",
and Wrede's take on the classic gateway Catan!

The game has been the subject of some criticism on account of concerns about its
replayability, theme, and interaction. More often than not these tend to be
overstated, although there is some substance to the concern that the game could
become scripted as players figure out the optimal way of ordering their developments
from game to game, something which isn't helped by the fact that there are only
minimal random elements which would normally help keep a game fresh. Yet it's not
entirely fair to state that the game isn't replayable, because there's a significant
amount of subtle interaction that keeps each game from being the same. Players will
need to compete fiercely to be the most advanced builder in a region to get the
benefit of tribute payments from their opponents, and how this competition plays out
will change things up from game to game.

While a potential lack of replayability might be the game's biggest weakness, it also
has a lot of strengths. In many respects Albion meets the classic criteria to serve
as a gateway game: it's got enough theme to make it interesting, a relatively
straight-forward rule-set, decent components, and a good amount of decision making,
all packed into a 60-90 minute time-frame. It's not an outstanding game, and perhaps
that's why we haven't heard more about it - the reality is that it suffers the
misfortune of appearing in a very crowded market that already has many superlative
games all begging for attention, so its cries to be played can quickly become drowned
out by louder voices. But it does have enough elements to make it feel somewhat
different from most euros in a competitive field.

As long as you're aware that it has a potentially shorter shelf life than other
games, Albion still worth bringing to the table for a number of plays, especially if
you like games that are about colonizing or building up your own miniature
civilization composed of different buildings by using resources and settlers wisely.
If you can pick it up cheaply, you might want to consider taking a look at this
somewhat unnoticed game from Mr Carcassonne. Albion is never going to match the
height of success achieved by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede's Carcassonne, because it doesn't
really have enough legs to compete with the very best. But it's still good enough to
offer both gamers and non-gamers more than just a couple of sessions of enjoyment.
And let's be honest, isn't that more than what some of the more outlandish
Carcassonne expansions deserve?